XK72 | Java and Adobe Flash Software

Thank you very much to the MidpSSH users who have provided bug fixes or assistance in tracking down bugs recently. The current development release attempts to fix the problems that Blackberry users have been having downloading and installing MidpSSH (thanks rivviepop). It also adds tentative Wi-fi support for Blackberry; fixes an SSH protocol error and connection drop when connecting to some SSH servers (thanks Stefan) and improves the security of the SSH implementation against rogue servers (thanks Aleksy). Thank you again for helping find and or fix these bugs.

I haven’t been able to respond to many of the emails I get about MidpSSH; I really appreciate the positive feedback, and I’m sorry I am not able to help troubleshoot problems. I haven’t had any time to dedicate to MidpSSH in a long time and I sadly don’t have time ongoing.

I think MidpSSH is pretty good at what it does. So my focus on MidpSSH is to fix the bugs that can be fixed, and some of them just don’t seem to be able to (bad phone software). I’m especially happy to apply patches for bugs that users have fixed! I’m not intending to add any new features to MidpSSH myself, however I do welcome your contributions. Download the source and have a go. Send me patches (unified diff against the latest svn preferred). If you would like to be involved and don’t know what to do? I can help with that.

On that note I have got some contributed code that I haven’t got around to including yet. Bluetooth support from both Alex Haan & Joel Jose… I’m going to try to review and include their work soon.

We begin the ongoing development of MidpSSH with a few small steps. This release includes the following fixes and changes:

• Fix the radio button bug on the Blackberry Pearl that prevented Pearl users from changing font sizes, or from SSH to Telnet etc.
• Settings forms no longer have an OK and Back option, they just have a back option. Reducing the number of options improves the UI on some device (you don’t have to activate a menu to choose OK or Back, there is just a Back option), and simplifies the usability. The only downside is that you can no longer cancel your changes, however I hope that none of the forms are major enough to make that a problem
• Support software upgrades including:
  • Proguard upgrade from 3.3.2 to 3.8
  • Antenna upgrade from 0.9.13 to 0.9.14
  • Upgrade to WTK2.5
  • BlackBerry JDE upgrade to 4.2.0

You can download the latest development version from the usual places. Please try it out and post feedback; especially Blackberry Pearl users.

Unresolved problems on the Blackberry include trying to make the trackball “click” activate the default action, rather than bringing up a menu. I’ve looked around at this and haven’t found a solution. It seems like just the continuing second-class-citizen status of MIDP applications on Blackberry!

The next major features on the horizon for MidpSSH revolve around improving the security of the application.

The first is password protection of the application itself; to prevent anyone else from using it to connect to your servers. Currently you are encouraged to store your username and password in MidpSSH as it is so hard to type reasonable passwords on a phone keyboard! Also if you’re using public-key authentication then anyone can use your key to access your servers. Password protecting MidpSSH will prevent anyone accessing it without your password and will also encrypt your configuration data (including session information and keys) so that people can’t gain access to it either.

Secondly the HTTP proxy solution will be improved and documented properly. Finally I have had feedback from Aleksy Schubert of Warsaw University regarding some improvements that can be made to the implementation of SSH in MidpSSH to make it more robust.

I’ll announce testing releases and further news here.

After over a year as the development version, and off-and-on development, I have released version 1.6.0 of MidpSSH. This is functionally identical to the last development version 1.5.7.

The major features are Keyboard Interactive authentication and an HTTP proxy solution for people behind telco firewalls.

If you don’t know about MidpSSH, it is an SSH client for use on Java enabled mobile devices such as cell phones. If you use SSH then MidpSSH could save you a trip to a computer if you’re in a bind.